Ash Wednesday 2008
Genesis 3:19b
Memento Mori
"At the end of the chess game all of the chess pieces go into the box." Anon.
Dear friends, every year on this day the church in her wisdom calls us to look in the mirror and to see a skull. Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. Those are the words we hear as another puts ashes on our foreheads. Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. These words - known and summarized by the Latin, memento mori - were first written down in the Book of Genesis, they are God's last words to Adam, to the human being, after the human being's feeble attempt to pass the buck by saying: "The serpent tricked me and I ate." God in Genesis will not allow the human being (Adam) to pass the buck, to shirk responsibility. And God's "tip" as it were to us humans is this: Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. It's a great irony that doing that makes us aware of our lives. Being aware of death, of our own personal death, makes us more present to our lives. Cesare Pavese, a man known for his insightful and pithy aphorisms once expanded on the memento mori by saying: "Remember that you are dust and see in that fact how unimportant so many things are." We might expand on his insight by saying: "And see in that fact how very important some few things are."
Our Lenten theme this year is "Death, Dying and Resurrection." I mentioned this recently and one parishioner responded spontaneously: "Well, that's a cheery theme." Oddly enough and rightly understood it is a cheery theme. There is nothing morbid for a person of faith in contemplating death. Every Ash Wednesday we are challenged to do just that. In fact: every celebration of Compline is - or can be - a mini-contemplation of death. Compline, the service at the end of the day, communal worship before going to sleep, is - in a sense - a liturgical exercise of the memento mori. Is that morbid? Why do all those young people flock to Compline at the Cathedral on Sunday evenings?
Christianity is counter-cultural in many ways and perhaps no more so than in this respect that believers reject the great cultural denial of death, that believers constantly de- tabooize death. Death and joy are not two words we usually bring together. In the Middle Ages and at times of widespread death Christians "laughed" at death in visualizations of the danse macabre in which they saw death as "the great equalizer," the final instance of social justice, which makes us all the same. As far as I was able to determine it was the historian and satirist of the 19th century, Thomas Carlyle, who created the phrase "the great equalizer." The idea though is much older and it goes back to Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament who said: "Everything that confronts (us) is vanity, since the same fate comes to all, to the righteous and the wicked, to the good and the evil." The common folk of the Middle Ages rejoiced in this "great equalizer," smiling at gothic, stone processionals of popes and kings alongside farmers and housewives, following the hooded grim reaper. The thought is caught beautifully in James Shirley's 1646 poem. The glories of our blood and state Are shadows, not substantial things; Death lays his icy hand on Kings; Sceptre and crown Must tumble down And in the dust be equal made With the poor crooked scythe and spade..
How different the culture "out there," outside these walls, where death is denied! C.S. Lewis told of an occasion when his wife asked a friend whether she had ever thought of death. The friend replied, "Oh, no. By the time I reach that age, science will have done something about it."
Ecclesiastes says that we must neither be hesitant about death, nor scoff at it. Rather, we should talk about it forthrightly, for it is the inevitable prospect we all face, and its effects will be devastating if we are unprepared. "The same destiny overtakes all" (Ecclesiastes 9:3), he warns, and that destiny is death. As George Bernard Shaw noted with pallid realism, "The statistics on death are quite impressive: one out of one people die."
Do any of you remember Dustin Hoffman in the 1971 movie Who is Harry Kellerman and Why is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? It begins with the main character, Harry Kellerman, sitting on the roof of a dilapidated building, writing a suicide note. He writes, "There was a time when I thought I would live forever. But I found it necessary to change those plans."
Far too many of us are like Harry Kellerman. We tend to assume we'll live forever. Death is seldom on our list of things to think about, especially if we're young and in good health, with lofty goals for the future. Ecclesiastes wants us to change, however, and to recognize that we all live under the ubiquitous umbrella of death. As we do, he wants us to ask, What meaning does life really have? Does death cancel even the possibility of ultimate meaning? Why should we struggle and toil if it will all end in death anyway?
In light of what Ecclesiastes has said, I think it would not be contradicting him to suggest that twice a week for the rest of our lives we ought to begin the day by looking in the mirror and saying, "I am going to die someday-maybe today." What a difference that could make in our lives! Even once a week wouldn't be a bad thing. How about every Wednesday?
And how about making the Wednesdays of this Lent be a beginning? These things will be our theme throughout Lent this year, dear friends. Parishioners will reflect on readings from the Liturgy of Burial from the Book of Common Prayer. Others will offer thoughts on death, dying, grief, transformation, legacy, and other related topics at presentations following our Lenten soup in the Great Hall. Hoping you'll put 6 pm, Epiphany chapel on your calendars for the Wednesdays in Lent, I wish us all a joyous Lent!
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